Why do Java people frequently consume exceptions silently?

Question

I never did any serious Java coding before, but I learned the syntax, libraries, and concepts based on my existing skills (Delphi & C#). One thing I hardly understand i

Answer 1

The combination of checked exceptions and interfaces lead to the situation that the code must handle exections that never ever get thrown. (The same applies to normal inheritance, too, but it's more common and easier to explain with interfaces)

Reason: The implementation of an interface may not throw (checked) exceptions other than those defined in the interface specification. For that reason, the creators of an interface, not knowing which methods of a class implementing the interface might actually need to throw an exception, might specifiy that all methods might throw at least one type of exception. Example: JDBC, where everything and its grandma is declared to throw SQLException.

But in reality, many methods of real implementations simply cannot fail, so under no circumstances, they ever throw an exception. Code calling this methods must still somehow "handle" the exception, and the easiest way is to do that swallow the exception. Nobody wants to clutter his code with seemingly useless error-handling that never ever gets executed.